


And Whatever the Future Holds

by femmenoire



Category: Into the Badlands (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-21
Updated: 2016-11-21
Packaged: 2018-09-01 08:05:16
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,290
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8616157
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/femmenoire/pseuds/femmenoire
Summary: Sunny and Veil think of the past when the present is too bleak.





	

**Author's Note:**

> post-S1 finale.

It was a nightmare.

But it gave him some comfort knowing that every time he slipped into unconsciousness, his body beaten, broken and exhausted, she would be there.

***  
It was as if she’d appeared out of thin air.

One day everything was as it should be for a clipper. Gray and red blood and pain and eat and sleep and wake up and it all starts over again. But then the next day it was different. It was gray and red blood and pain and soft touches and quiet voices and “tell me if this hurts too much.”

He hadn’t said a word. But still she was gentle, her touch tender, her eyes sad.

He hadn’t said a word, but he watched (the deep creases around her mouth as she frowned over his stiches) and listened (the way her breath hitched as if she could feel the pain he had long ago learned not to acknowledge) and smelled (the wind brought the scent of her hair to his nostrils, a light floral scent that seemed too beautiful and precious for the hell that was the Badlands).

Soon enough his routine adjusted for her. Even if she didn’t know what she’d done to him. It was gray and red blood and pain and the way she said his name (her voice dripping in a care he couldn’t remember if he’d ever experienced) and eat and sleep and wake abruptly in the middle of the night hard and sweating, the feel of her skin (soft he knew it had to be) just on the edges of his fingertips.

It was months of training and fighting and clipping and waiting to catch just a glimpse of her through a dingy window or see the ends of her hair floating on the wind as she rounded a corner or hear the soft timbre of her voice as she tried to soothe her patients.

It was months of trying to bury what he felt because he was Regent now and wanting anyone, anything, the way he wanted her was forbidden. And so he spent weeks killing faster refusing to get even a scratch in battle so that he could avoid that gentle touch and the sweep of her hair over her face as she bent over his body, fixing him in ways he didn’t even know he was broken. And when he couldn’t, when an enemy or a reckless colt was lucky, he endured the grace of her presence, fighting back the urge to talk to her, attempting to fool himself into believing that he didn’t want her as much as he did.

It was months of him drunk, a fresh wound clean and patched, stumbling to the Dollhouse.

It was months of sweaty sex in dark rooms so that he could pretend this body was hers, his body satisfied, but not sated.

It was months of shame as the cycle repeated.

***  
There was a small part of his unconscious brain that wanted to wake up here. If he did, he could pretend for just a little while that the rest hadn’t happened. That none of the blood on his hands had put her in danger.

But it was a fleeting wish.

He could no more resist remembering her smile, the sound of her laughter (the unfamiliar feeling of his own happiness in return), the feel of her soft skin beneath his calloused palms, the taste of her on his lips, their child, any more than he had been able to resist her.

***  
The deep gash on his chest, angry and inflamed didn’t hurt any more or less than any other wound.

She had certainly seen worse.

She scowled at him as she swabbed away dead skin and dabbed disinfectant on the fresh new meat exposed there.

He flinched. She jumped at the response.

“If you had just come to see me earlier, you wouldn’t be in this predicament.”

It was the most she’d said to him in all the time that she’d been patching up the clippers and colts. She didn’t talk at all when she’d just been assisting her father and, after she took over the small apothecary, she’d only said “Hello” when he entered, “Goodbye” when he left and soft murmured platitudes while she sewed up some new part of his body sliced with a very sharp blade.

She kept going. “But of course you didn’t come to me. That would be admitting that you’re not invincible. Which you’re not, by the way. None of you are. And yet you all stab and poke at each other as if it doesn’t matter. As if there are no consequences.”

He hadn’t planned to do it. In fact he had always planned to do the opposite. But something had come over him. Maybe it was the pain that he barely registered, or the sound of her voice, not gentle this time, but angry, hard. Or maybe it was the smell of her hair, which had always made him feel lightheaded and happy and aroused at the same time.

Or maybe it was just time.

He gripped her hand, not hard enough to break anything, but firm enough to make it clear. “I know the consequences better than anyone else.”

It was different than he had dreamed. Better, but different.

Her eyes bore into his. They were beautiful, and he realized he had never been able to meet her gaze before that moment, usually settling his eyes somewhere around the permanent dimple on her left cheek. He had imagined her soft and gentle, calm and weak, his complete opposite. But what he saw looking into her eyes for the first time was different. More complex. Harder. Different.

And she seemed to see him for the first time as well. What she saw, however, he couldn’t tell from her face alone.

“Don’t you want more than this,” she asked, in a voice much more quiet than before, but somehow even more impassioned.

“I’m Regent,” he responded automatically. “There is no more than this.”

She placed her hand on top of his, her fingers trembled just a bit, her palm was warm. She scraped her fingernails across the skin at the back of his hand without seeming to notice.

“Are you sure?”

***  
He was unconscious when her name slipped from his lips.

“Veil,” he said, equal parts prayer and sob.

There was no one else in the room to hear or care.

***  
The baby was restless. He flipped around in her stomach, sometimes kicking at her spleen, sometimes resting on her bladder, sometimes punching at her ribs.

She welcomed the pain.

She tried to imagine him; his face, the sound of his voice, the feel of his arms around her.

She wondered if he was in pain. She shook her head. He was always in pain. She wondered if he was dead. She shook her head again. She couldn’t allow herself to think like that.

The baby kicked and punched in quick succession. She smiled sadly and rubbed her hand over her belly in a circular motion. “Your father’s son,” she said to the empty, darkened room.

She was thankful there was no one around to hear her cry the loud and angry and sad sobs of a woman who was both heartbroken and intent on vengeance.

***

_“Don’t you want more than this,” she asked him, watching as his eyes hardened and his voice changed from warm and human, to cold and robotic. From Sunny to Regent._

_“There is no more than this,” he said. She didn’t believe him._

_“Are you sure?”_

_She hadn’t been sure herself until she’d seen his gaze soften in confusion._

There would be so much more for them.

 

 

Soundtrack: Johnnyswim "Rescue You"


End file.
